Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The Blue Fugates of Kentucky & The Best Book of the Month

This month I read mostly cozy mysteries except for one bio, The World's Strongest Librarian. Cozy mysteries are about as "deep" as my brain can handle most of the time, and especially the past few weeks. This week I also read some inspirational fiction that I loved and I plan to get more books by their authors. The Promise of Lumby and Dearest Dorothy, Are We There Yet? were really good. I cared about the characters and I wanted to live in their little towns. I seldom read inspirational books but I am so glad I found these. I can hardly wait to get more in their series. A day or two ago I finished reading Poisoned Prose by Ellery Adams. It is the fifth in her Books by the Bay series. On Goodreads I gave it 4 stars. I am going to give it "the best of the bunch for the month." Ellery Adams never disappoints me.

It really is a good read, but for me it was especially interesting because it involves a group of storytellers. It brought back fond memories of when I was able to attend Tejas Storytelling Festival in Denton, Texas many years ago, and the numerous times I attended storytelling events at WTAMU in Canyon, Texas down the road from home. Last night I dreamt about being back at my old job and telling stories to a group of kids at the library. It was a very pleasant dream.

What was really interesting in Poisoned Prose, and something I had never heard of, was a condition one of the characters in the book had called Methemoglobinemia. The woman in the book, Violet, had skin the color of a rotten plum, a blue/purple.

Since I had never heard of this disorder I googled it and discovered it is a real thing. I found it fascinating. If you have this genetic disorder your blood is the color of chocolate and your skin will be a shade of blue or purple. Not just occasionally but permanently. When I did a search on this disorder numerous articles on the Fugate family popped up. The disorder has been passed through 6 generations of the Fugate's in a small area of Kentucky. The following is from one of the internet articles: "They're known simply as the "blue people"
in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived
to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration.
For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the
pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black." I thought about those last two sentences for quite a while.